| >Small seems more efficient. // Small seems generally less efficient to me. Where I am in the UK there are lots of small councils, people being paid to make the same decisions over-and-over again when there could just as easily be amalgamation - or to be honest a general regional or UK policy - that would save a lot of time and money. For example, across every council area above a certain size has a sports centre. Instead of deciding the best way to run them centrally - with leeway to establish better methods - they're each run as a separate entity by a non-specialist council (or more recently being farmed out to companies to try to run at a profit). The UK should have a team that does sports centres and manages them all, that would be more efficient. You don't need 1000 different HR policies writing, 1000 meetings about lifeguard wage levels, 1000 separate contracts for chlorine delivery and testing, etc.. Similarly every major town or city has it's own bus service. They all do the same things, but separately and so with none of the economies - like regional servicing centres, group buying, centralised timetable control, centralised ticket purchase, centralised driver and personnel training. Sure there are differences across the UK but there are far more similarities. I've lived in Wales, England and Scotland and the people types and their demands are largely the same so far as I can tell. Healthcare, education, housing, transport, ... The UK gov is running a train service at the moment because none of the other myriad of train companies would touch it, they're making billions of profit. There seems absolutely no reason that same government-company can't do the same thing with the other rail areas - instead we have lots of companies all do the same thing and all failing to communicate well and integrate their transport policies. Education - we have a dozen companies writing exam papers and then there's more effort to ensure the exams are equal standards; then there's competition to win schools based on which exams will be easiest. Instead we have the skills in the teaching workforce to simply write one paper centrally. Needless duplication. I won't rant on [more]. Some systems do have a natural medium or small scale that is more efficient I'm sure. School class sizes should be small. Schools can be small, but the education authorities that manage those teachers and schools are doing the same thing that the other education authorities are doing and scale brings efficiencies and focus of skills. |